


Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

by Anglophile_Rin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abandonment, Abuse, Canonical Character Death, Drugs, F/M, M/M, Miscarriage, One Night Stands, Prostitution, Theft, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-25
Updated: 2013-03-25
Packaged: 2017-12-06 10:26:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anglophile_Rin/pseuds/Anglophile_Rin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mile markers on the road we never really saw. First love, first kiss, first loss - snapshots in the life of Dean Winchester.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

He’s four years old when his mommy gently tells him that a puppy is too much responsibility for someone so little. Maybe when he’s older, she says. Maybe when your baby brother can help you out a little bit.

He's four years and ten months old when he becomes a parent.

 

***

 

He's five the first time Dad leaves him completely alone with his baby brother. There's a last minute hunt, and Dad can't find anyone to watch them.

Be a good boy.

Lock the door behind me.

Yes, the chain, too, but be careful standing on the chair.

Use the stove to heat the bottles, not the microwave.

Look out for Sammy.

 

***

 

He's six before he finally realizes that he's not going to school. Not that he really needs it. He already has his job - watching out for Sammy- and when they're both big he'll be a hunter. You don't need school for that, school teaches you all the wrong things.

This is what he tells Dad, so Dad doesn't get sad and guilty, and cry when he thinks they're both asleep.

He doesn't tell him how much he wanted to go to school, how excited he'd been about making friends for the first time, and having a teacher who he could call Miss and who would exclaim over his art like Mom did before.

Those things aren't important, anyway.

 

***

 

He's seven the first time Sammy gets really sick. The three-year-old is crying, face red from frustration and fever.

He tries to call Uncle Bobby and Pastor Jim and anyone else who might know where Dad is, but no one answers and no one calls 911 for monsters, so he doesn't even know the number.

He tries to sing Hey Jude, but he doesn't remember the words and for ten minutes he cries with Sammy because forgetting the words is like forgetting Mom.

When Dad comes back from killing a werewolf, both boys are shivering in a bathtub full of as much ice as his numb fingers could drag in from the machine two doors down. Sammy's fever is down, and that's what matters.

He'll never have full feeling in his right thumb or pinky finger again.

Dad makes him memorize "911" the next morning.

 

***

 

He's eight the first time he kisses a girl. Her name is Nora, and she and her family are going to Disney World.

He didn't even know that Disney World was in Orlando - just that a potential shifter was.

She comes home when Dad's out hunting and he's getting Sammy a chocolate bar from the machine that will give him two if he kicks it.

She has glitter on her face and a tiara in her blonde hair.

He thinks she looks like a princess.

He kisses her and she giggles.

Sammy asks why he has glitter on his face.

He ignores him, and secretly keeps the piece of Mickey Mouse confetti he finds later in his hair.

 

***

 

He's nine when he finally starts at school.

Sammy's old enough to go now, so the department of education can take over as babysitter.

He starts in the fourth grade.

Everyone else whispers about the new kid, giggling over how he has funny clothes and uses words too grown up for him even though he can barely get through the readings.

After a few days everyone has decided he's dumb, a little slow, more of a jock, etc etc.,

even the teacher (who corrects him when he calls her Miss - "now, dear, it's Mrs. Jacobs, remember?").

This won't ever change.

He doesn't care, though. Everyone knows Sammy's the smart one. Even if he had started out in kindergarten like everyone else, Sammy would always be the brains of the operation.

 

***

 

When he's ten, he teaches himself how to ride a bike.

He's never cared to know before, but Sammy's six and all his friends at their new school ride them and he wants to learn, too.

He falls over constantly, unable to get the balance right. His legs are too long for the pedals on the bike he took from the yard two blocks away, and his knees keep bumping into his ribs.

But he figures out the tricks soon enough, and can make it to the end of the street and back.

When he teaches Sammy how to do it that weekend, the bumps and bruises and the potentially sprained wrist are worth it.

 

***

 

He steals for the first time when he's eleven.

He wishes he could say it was for something noble - food or clothes for his rapidly growing younger brother or toothpaste or something.

And those would come later -more often and more urgently than he'd ever like- but this time.

Well.

To be honest, he just wanted to impress a girl.

Her name was Emily, and she only liked really smart boys.

He was not (he believed) really smart.

But, with the right props he could definitely fake it.

So he stole a handful of books from the store. He didn't want to go to the library, for some reason his ruse has to include him actually owning the books.

Emily never gave him the time of day, and most of the books are long gone by now - left behind, or used for less responsible purposes in his teenaged years. But he still has a couple - 1984, The Great Gatsby and Slaughterhouse Five.

 

***

 

When he is twelve years old, he kisses a boy for the first time.

His name is Andrew, and he likes classic rock and smells like cinnamon buns.

This is also when he learns what "homophobic" means, and gets hit in the face by something other than a monster or sparring partner.

He is suspended from school for three days for fighting.

He's too newly ashamed to correct the principal.

 

***

 

He's thirteen the first time he has sex.

He's new (again) and she's an exchange student from Japan with a name he never managed to pronounce properly. She was sixteen, and when they showed each other their ages on their fingers to overcome the language barrier, he might have added a couple fingers to his.

They went to his motel room while Sammy was at soccer practice, and watched Spanish novelas that neither of them understood. They couldn't speak each other's language so they spoke in tongues and hands, in moans and sighs.

Dad came back the next day before dawn, and they moved on to a new town. He never saw her again, never learned how to say her name.

But he was left with a lifelong appreciation for the beauty of Asian women.

 

***

 

He's fourteen when he learns that bodies can be for sale and that the ones willing to buy like them young and pretty.

 

***

 

He's fifteen the first time Dad hits him hard enough to make him bleed, to leave a mark, to snap a bone. They're not sparing, and he's not defending himself because Sammy's gone and he could be dead so he deserves this because he has one job and if he can't even do that right what good is he?

It opens the floodgates of all the frustration and grief that Dad has been holding inside of him all these years, and even though Sammy's back from Flagstaff and he's okay, it's not the last mark Dad will leave him.

 

***

 

When he's seventeen he drops out of school. He's sick of the looks and the whispers, of always being new and never catching up. He's sick of getting things wrong because he was between schools when they learned it and he's sick of high school girls thinking five minutes in the closet meant forever and high school boys thinking they could start a fight because they were scared of their own hormones.

He tells Dad it's because he wants to help hunt more, now, and Dad believes him.

 

***

 

He's eighteen the first time he gets arrested, which is unfortunate because it means his first is permanent. He can't even remember anymore what the arrest was for - larceny, drugs, prostitution, grave desecration.

He manages to make bail without Dad finding out (thank an absent God for Bobby), but Sammy sees the ink on his hands and they fight and Sam hates him. Is embarrassed by him. Thinks he's better than him.

Which is good. He never wanted Sammy in these gutters, too.

 

***

 

He's nineteen when he becomes a father by genetics and not just behavior. Lisa will never seek him out afterwards, and she'll lie to his face near a decade down the line. He'll never know that Ben is really his, and that he made something so good and precious, and Ben will never know that the absent father, who he thinks never cared, loved him from the moment he saw him, and spent a year battling his nature and nurture just to be there.

 

***

 

He gets his first tattoo when he's twenty and never tells anyone about it. It's on his hip - low enough that his boxers cover it and small enough that you don't notice it right away when they don't. It might be a little girly, but it means he can see it and sometimes that's the only thing that makes him smile.

It's an unfinished piece of music. A bar staff with a treble clef and a flat on the b line, marked out as 4/4 time. A quarter c before the break and then a quarter a and nothing else.

He forgot the words when he was little, and it was like forgetting her, so he prints the tune on his hip and it's indelible, indestructible, indisputable.

 

***

 

He gets his GED when he's twenty-one because Sammy blushes whenever his friends ask what his big brother does and he hates that his lack of education embarrasses the kid.

Sammy never mentions it, and the piece of paper gets left behind in a motel in Michigan.

 

***

 

When he's twenty-two he has his first boyfriend, though it's not even nearly the first guy he's slept with. His name is Aaron, and even though he's white and blond, something in his eyes reminds him of that first girl, the one he couldn't pronounce the name of.

They go on six dates. Aaron asks him home to meet his mom and he actually is going to go. But Dad shows up early, and something's gone wrong and they need to hightail it out of there before the police come knocking.

Dad dumps their phones and switches out the plates on the Impala and he never gets to say good bye. He wonders sometimes if Aaron still hates him, and if his mom was disappointed.

 

***

 

He's twenty-three when Sammy leaves and there's a sick, dead feeling in his gut that he remembers from when Mom died. It hurts his throat to think of his baby brother away without anyone to look after him, and while he can't cry in front of Dad he can drink, and so he does.

Things are too quiet without Dad and Sammy fighting all the time. Dad apparently thinks so, too.

Even though he's older now, he still doesn't fight back.

 

***

 

When he's twenty-four he falls in love.

Though he'll never admit it.

Her name is Cassie and she'll fight him and tease him, fuck him and grin. She's in college, and so smart and witty, she's like a Gilmore Girl with velvety cocoa skin.

She calls him nuts when he trusts her with his biggest secret, and pushes him away.

He gives up on love after that - love only leaves you with pain and forgotten song lyrics and that sick, dead feeling in your gut.

 

***

 

He's twenty-five when he almost becomes a father for the second time, but he doesn't know about this one anymore than he did the first.

He doesn't know her name, but she smells like cinnamon buns and doesn't punch him in the face when he kisses her, so that's good enough for him.

She trips over a rug a few weeks later, long after he's gone, and he loses his daughter before she ever existed.

 

***

 

He's twenty-six when Dad goes on a hunting trip.

He hasn't been back in a few days.

  
  



End file.
